Lhe former priest of Orléans was found guilty of hundreds of rapes and aggravated sexual assaults on four boys. The Loiret Assize Court sentenced him on Saturday to 17 years of criminal imprisonment.
The accused, Olivier de Scitivaux de Greische, 64, was found “guilty of all acts of rape and aggravated sexual assault,” the court said. She announced a security period of 10 years, which goes beyond the requisitions of the attorney general.
The facts judged date back to the 1990s and 2000s when Olivier de Scitivaux de Greische, ordained priest in 1989, became involved with the parents of his victims, a family of three. He then regularly invites himself to their table and stays to sleep in the room of the eldest, who will be attacked and raped from the age of 9.
In front of a packed courtroom, in which many officials of the Catholic Church and parishioners have taken their seats since Tuesday, the three brothers (aged 7 to 9 years old at the start of the abuse and around forty years old today hui) and a friend had taken turns recounting, with detail and modesty, the violence to which they were victims each in turn, without knowing that the others were suffering the same attacks.
The day before, in front of a forbidden room and hanging on his words, the former priest – returned to the secular state at his request – “recognized everything without reservation”. “I recognize, since it is necessary to use the words, the touching, the caresses, the fellatio, the digital and penile penetrations, all the facts,” he declared.
The accused also confessed, for the first time, to rape and sexual assault on two other victims in 1982. However, these facts could not be judged due to the statute of limitations.
Following the requisitions, the court also sentenced the accused to “socio-judicial monitoring”, “a care injunction”, “the ban on carrying out any professional or voluntary activity involving contact with minors”, among others .
Saturday morning, his counsel, Me Damien Brossier, had called on the court to be lenient, stressing that his client “is no longer a danger”, and that “we cannot be sentenced to 64 years as to 37 years. Age has passed and time has passed without offense” since the condemned acts.
The facts occurred until the beginning of the 2000s. However, the first alerts were issued by facilitators and families to the diocese in the 1980s, by families or chaplaincy facilitators in 1998. In vain.
The Catholic Church has for years been rocked by child abuse scandals around the world, and regularly accused of turning a blind eye to them and ignoring the victims. In France, a report released in October 2021 estimates that in 70 years, around 330,000 people have been attacked within the Church when they were minors.
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